A Poet to His Beloved: The Early Love Poems of W.B.Yeats

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Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.” In Greek mythology, Leda was a princess of Aetolia who became the wife of king Tyndareus of Sparta. Zeus, the king of the Gods, was attracted to her beauty. He took the guise of a swan and raped her on the same night she slept with her husband. Based on this myth, the poem by Yeats describes the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan. It is written in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet and combines psychological realism with a mystic vision. Leda and the Swan is one of the most famous poems of Yeats’s 1928 collection The Tower, which is one of the most celebrated and important literary works of the 20th century. It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.” RELATED READ: The fascinating history of the Yeats family, revealed. 9. Destiny – Lady Jane Wilde Credit: commons.wikimedia.org Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.”

Plays in Prose and Verse, Written for an Irish Theatre (includes The Player Queen, first produced in London at King's Hall, May 25, 1919), Macmillan, 1922. Yeats’s poems and plays produced during his senate term and beyond are, at once, local and general, personal and public, Irish and universal. At night the poet could “sweat with terror” (a phrase in his poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen") because of the surrounding violence, but he could also generalize those terrifying realities by linking them with events in the rest of the world and with all of history. The energy of the poems written in response to these disturbing times gave astonishing power to his collection The Tower(1928), which is often considered his best single book, though The Wild Swans at Coole(1917; enlarged edition, 1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer(1921), The Tower, The Winding Stair(1929); enlarged edition, 1933), and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems(1932), also possess considerable merit. This eight-line poem, thought to be an expression of love from Yeats to Maud Gonne, was initially titled ‘Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’. Aedh is an Irish God of Death who appeared in several Yeats poems. 9. The Second Coming – one of Yeats’ most famous poems Credit: ndla.no The Death of Cuchulain (first produced in 1949), critical edition edited by Phillip L. Marcus, Cornell University Press, 1981.One of the most outstanding parts from ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ is the lines, “I know that I shall meet my fate / Somewhere among the clouds above; / Those that I fight I do not hate, / Those that I guard I do not love.” Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is widely considered “the great love poet of her generation.” She is one of the great Irish language poets of today. She bid me take love easy as the leaves grow on the tree. But I being young and foolish with her would not agree.” Yeats was already mining Irish myth and folklore. The Rose includes "Fergus and the Druid", "Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea", "The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland" and the glorious "To Ireland in the Coming Times", the latter containing the poet's solemn avocation: "Know that I would accounted be / True brother of a company / That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong/ Ballad and story, rann and song." At the same time, the classical tradition was embedded in his imagination and would bear important fruit. Here, in the second stanza, Yeats squares up with grand self-confidence to both Irish and classical myth-making. Despite Yeats’s title, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, there is little sense of patriotism at the national level displayed by the speaker.

Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, edited by Ann Saddlemyer, Colin Smythe, 1982. The turn of the century marked Yeats’s increased interest in theatre, an interest influenced by his father, a famed artist and orator who loved highly dramatic moments in literature. In the summer of 1897 the author enjoyed his first stay at Coole Park, the County Galway estate of Lady Augusta Gregory. There he devised, with Lady Gregory and her neighbor Edward Martyn, plans for promoting an innovative, native Irish drama. In 1899 they staged the first of three annual productions in Dublin, including Yeats’s The Countess Kathleen,and in 1902 they supported a company of amateur Irish actors in staging both George Russell’s Irish legend “Deirdre” and Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan.The success of these productions led to the founding of the Irish National Theatre Society with Yeats as president. After a wealthy sponsor volunteered to pay for the renovation of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre as the company’s permanent home, the theatre opened on December 27, 1904. It included plays by the company’s three directors: Lady Gregory, John M. Synge, and Yeats, who was represented that night with On Baile’s Strand,the first of his several plays featuring heroic ancient Irish warrior Cuchulain.Published in 1928, ‘Among School Children’ is definitely one of the most famous and best W.B. Yeats poems. Perhaps one of his most famous poems, ‘The Stolen Child’, tops our list of the best W.B. Yeats poems of all time. Its major theme is the loss of innocence as a child grows up. The Celtic Twilight (nonfiction), Lawrence & Bullen, 1893, Macmillan, 1894 , revised and enlarged edition, A. H. Bullen, 1902. Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, two volumes, edited by John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson, Columbia University Press, 1970.

Maud Gonne was a tall, beautiful and confident actress and a woman of considerable social standing. She was the daughter of an army officer and had been educated and raised in Paris, after her mother had died when Gonne was still very young. She had a daughter from a relationship she had with a French journalist and spent her time between Paris, Dublin and London. But is there any comfort to be found? Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?”

Author: William Butler Yeats

The Gonne-Yeats Letters, 1893-1938, edited by Anna Macbride White and Norman A. Jeffares, Syracuse University Press, 1994.

Also author of Irish Fairy and Folk Tales, 1918. Contributor to periodicals. A Poet to His Beloved has been published with musical score by Lowell Liebermann, T. Presser, 1994. At the end of "The Sorrow of Love", the man and his cry are re-framed. No longer obliterated, they are "composed", in the pictorial sense of being held together, and perhaps somewhat pacified. Painful experience has redeemed shallow aestheticism. "The Sorrow of Love" proclaims that the young poet has found one of his major themes, and begun the transformation of failed relationship into imaginative triumph.Names of persons (given names), and places are not tagged. Terms for cultural and social roles are not tagged. Canonical References Discover more of Yeats’s greatest poetry with The Major Works including poems, plays, and critical prose (Oxford World’s Classics) . You can find more great poetry recommendations with this selection of Louis MacNeice poems, these classic Seamus Heaney poems, and these poems of the great modernist pioneer, T. E. Hulme. Scaffolding’ is a poem by one of the greatest Irish poets of all time, Seamus Heaney. This poem is simple and effective in its telling of the importance of building the foundations in any relationship.